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Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2011, Tony celebrated his 25th year anniversary with IBM Storage on the same day as the IBM's Centennial. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson
)

This week, Allyson Klein, Director of Technical Leadership Marketing from Intel, interviewed me for the Intel® [Chip Chat podcast] to promote the upcoming [IBM Edge conference] to be held June 4-8 in Orlando, Florida. Intel is a big sponsor of the conference. The podcast is only about 8 minutes long. Enjoy!

Ten years ago, I travelled to New York City with my colleague, Randy Fleenor, to present the latest in IBM tape technology for the 50th Anniversary. On Thursday evening that week, the latest movie in the Star Wars saga, Episode II: Attack of the Clones was just released, and it was being shown using the new Digital Light Projection (DLP) technology just around the corner at the Ziegfeld theater! This movie was the first live-action film to be filmed entirely digital. George Lucas saw that digital video was the future, and started the process moving forward with this film.

I convinced Randy to join me, and we arrived at 11:10pm, the movie was scheduled to start at 11pm, so we figured we had only missed a few previews. We walked into a completely empty lobby. I asked for two tickets for the 11pm show at the ticket counter, and was told it was all sold out, and there was a huge line around the building for all the people waiting to see the 1:00am show, and that we might get in to see the 3:00am show.

Randy and I had meetings on Friday morning, so we were not going to wait in line all night to see a 3am show! Just then, a young man comes out of the theater. He said his girlfriend can't make it, and wanted a refund for his two tickets. I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, offered to buy them directly at face value, and the theater employees approved the transaction. The seats were front row of the balcony section. By then we had missed all the previews and a short bit of the movie, but that was alright with us.

(FTC Disclosure: I am both an employee and stockholder in IBM. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission may consider this a paid, celebrity endorsement of LTO-5 tapes and the LTFS technology. References to other companies are for illustrative purposes and do not represent an endorsement of their products or services.)

Digital recording is ideal for all types of video, including movies, television, and commercial advertisements.
The latest excitement is over IBM's Linear Tape File System™ (LTFS), which IBM donated to the IT industry as open source so that everyone in the world can benefit. This allows tape cartridges to be treated like USB memory sticks, the ultimate in portability of data. It is supported for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and already well embraced by the Media-and-Entertainment (M&E) industry.

"The move to IBM technology has helped the network shrink its archive from 1,507 to just 388 square feet, representing dramatic systems and energy-cost savings."

"AlphaTV has been broadcasting since 1996, creating and storing all forms of video entertainment, from soap operas and documentaries, to movies and sporting events, and creating a vast video archive along the way. Initially, AlphaTV archived its programming on Sony Beta SP format video cassettes that stored up to 90 minutes of content. Not long after, in need of storage that offered greater density, it turned to DVCPRO format videos that stored up to 120 minutes. But even that format was not allowing the network to keep pace with its ballooning archive, a storage infrastructure that by 2011 spanned more than 1,507 square feet."

"'A Greek TV series stored on 100 DVCPRO tapes took up four shelves in our library, whereas on LTO-5 cartridge now takes up the space of a deck of playing cards,' Constantinos Colombus, chief technology officer at AlphaTV, said in a statement."

"IBM LTFS, an intuitive and graphical file system that provides direct access to data on LTO 5 drives, has enabled AlphaTV to manage, move and share video files much like they can with disk-management systems, by simply dragging and dropping. As a result, file management is easier to do and far more efficient, said Colombus."

To prepare for this anniversary, I spoke with Brad Johns, of [Brad Johns Consulting]. Brad was head of IBM tape marketing for a while, and ran tape customer councils to gather feedback from our largest customers. Brad was my mentor in marketing at IBM from 2003-2007 and has since retired from IBM to start his own consulting practice.

Well it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means.. IBM announcements! Today, IBM announces that next Monday marks the 60th anniversary of first commercial digital tape storage system! I am on the East coast this week visiting clients, but plan to be back in Tucson in time for the cake and fireworks next Monday.

1947 - Bing Crosby adopts audio recording for his radio program. This eliminated him doing the same program live twice per day, perhaps the first example of using technology for "deduplication".

According to the IBM Archives the [IBM 726 tape drive was formally announced May 21, 1952]. It was the size of a refrigerator, and the tape reel was the size of a large pizza. The next time you pull a frozen pizza from your fridge, you can remember this month's celebration!

When I first joined IBM in 1986, there were three kinds of IBM tape. The round reel called 3420, and the square cartridge called 3480, and the tubes that contained a wide swath of tape stored in honeycomb shelves called the [IBM 3850 Mass Storage System].

My first job at IBM was to work on DFHSM, which was specifically started in 1977 to manage the IBM 3850, and later renamed to the DFSMShsm component of the DFSMS element of the z/OS operating system. This software was instrumental in keeping disk and tape at high 80-95 percent utilization rates on mainframe servers.

While visiting a client in Detroit, the client loved their StorageTek tape automation silo, but didn't care for the StorageTek drives inside were incompatible with IBM formats. They wanted to put IBM drives into the StorageTek silos. I agreed it was a good idea, and brought this back to the attention of development. In a contentious meeting with management and engineers, I presented this feedback from the client.

Everyone in the room said IBM couldn't do that. I asked "Why not?" The software engineers I spoke to already said they could support it. With StorageTek at the brink of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, I argued that IBM drives in their tape automation would ease the transition of our mainframe customers to an all-IBM environment.

Was the reason related to business/legal concerns, or was their a hardware issue? It turned out to be a little of both. On the business side, IBM had to agree to work with StorageTek on service and support to its mutual clients in mixed environments. On the technical side, the drive had to be tilted 12 degrees to line up with the robotic hand. A few years later, the IBM silo-compatible 3592 drive was commercially available.

Rather than put StorageTek completely out of business, it had the opposite effect. Now that IBM drives can be put in StorageTek libraries, everyone wanted one, basically bringing StorageTek back to life. This forced IBM to offer its own tape automation libraries.

In 1993, I filed my first patent. It was for the RECYCLE function in DFHSM to consolidate valid data from partial tapes to fresh new tapes. Before my patent, the RECYCLE function selected tapes alphabetically, by volume serial (VOLSER). My patent evaluated all tapes based on how full they were, and sorted them least-full to most-full, to maximize the return of cartridges.

Different tape cartridges can hold different amounts of data, especially with different formats on the same media type, with or without compression, so calculating the percentage full turned out to be a tricky algorithm that continues to be used in mainframe environments today.

The patent was popular for cross-licensing, and IBM has since filed additional patents for this invention in other countries to further increase its license revenue for intellectual property.

In 1997, IBM launched the IBM 3494 Virtual Tape Server (VTS), the first virtual tape storage device, blending disk and tape to optimal effect. This was based off the IBM 3850 Mass Storage Systems, which was the first virtual disk system, that used 3380 disk and tape to emulate the older 3350 disk systems.

In the VTS, tape volume images would be emulated as files on a disk system, then later moved to physical tape. We would call the disk the "Tape Volume Cache", and use caching algorithms to decide how long to keep data in cache, versus destage to tape. However, there were only a few tape drives, and sometimes when the VTS was busy, there were no tape drives available to destage the older images, and the cache would fill up.

I had already solved this problem in DFHSM, with a function called pre-migration. The idea was to pre-emptively copy data to tape, but leave it also on disk, so that when it needed to be destaged, all we had to do was delete the disk copy and activate the tape copy. We patented using this idea for the VTS, and it is still used in the successor models of IBM Sysem Storage TS7740 virtual tape libraries today.

Today, tape continues to be the least expensive storage medium, about 15 to 25 times less expensive, dollar-per-GB, than disk technologies. A dollar of today's LTO-5 tape can hold 22 days worth of MP3 music at 192 Kbps recording. A full TS1140 tape cartridge can hold 2 million copies of the book "War and Peace".

(If you have not read the book, Woody Allen took a speed reading course and read the entire novel in just 20 minutes. He summed up the novel in three words: "It involves Russia." By comparison, in the same 20 minutes, at 650MB/sec, the TS1140 drive can read this novel over and over 390,000 times.)

If you have your own "war stories" about tape, I would love to hear them, please consider posting a comment below.

Those that prefer to work with one-stop shopping of an IT Supermarket, with companies like IBM, HP and Dell who offer a complete set of servers, storage, switches, software and services, what we call "The Five S's".

Those that perfer shopping for components at individual specialty shops, like butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, hoping that this singular focus means the products are best-of-breed in the market. Companies like HDS for disk, Quantum for tape, and Symantec for software come to mind.

My how the IT landscape for vendors has evolved in just the past five years! Cisco starts to sell servers, and enters a "mini-mall" alliance with EMC and VMware to offer vBlock integrated stack of server, storage and switches with VMware as the software hypervisor. For those not familiar with the concept of mini-malls, these are typically rows of specialty shops. A shopper can park their car once, and do all their shopping from the various shops in the mini-mall. Not quite "one-stop" shopping of a supermarket, but tries to address the same need.

("Who do I call when it breaks?" -- The three companies formed a puppet company, the Virtual Computing Environment company, or VCE, to help answer that question!)

Among the many things IBM has learned in its 100+ years of experience, it is that clients want choices. Cisco figured this out also, and partnered with NetApp to offer the aptly-named FlexPod reference architecture. In effect, Cisco has two boyfriends, when she is with EMC, it is called a Vblock, and when she is with NetApp, it is called a FlexPod. I was lucky enough to find this graphic to help explain the three-way love triangle.

Did this move put a strain on the relationship between Cisco and EMC? Last month, EMC announced VSPEX, a FlexPod-like approach that provides a choice of servers, and some leeway for resellers to make choices to fit client needs better. Why limit yourself to Cisco servers, when IBM and HP servers are better? Is this an admission that Vblock has failed, and that VSPEX is the new way of doing things? No, I suspect it is just EMC's way to strike back at both Cisco and NetApp in what many are calling the "Stack Wars". (See [The Stack Wars have Begun!], [What is the Enterprise Stack?], or [The Fight for the Fully Virtualized Data Center] for more on this.)

(FTC Disclosure: I am both an employee and shareholder of IBM, so the U.S. Federal Trade Commission may consider this post a paid, celebrity endorsement of the IBM PureFlex system. IBM has working relationships with Cisco, NetApp, and Quantum. I was not paid to mention, nor have I any financial interest in, any of the other companies mentioned in this blog post. )

Last month, IBM announced its new PureSystems family, ushering in a [new era in computing]. I invite you all to check out the many "Paterns of Expertise" available at the [IBM PureSystems Centre]. This is like an "app store" for the data center, and what I feel truly differentiates IBM's offerings from the rest.

The trend is obvious. Clients who previously purchased from specialty shops are discovering the cost and complexity of building workable systems from piece-parts from separate vendors has proven expensive and challenging. IBM PureFlex™ systems eliminate a lot of the complexity and effort, but still offer plenty of flexibility, choice of server processor types, choice of server and storage hypervisors, and choice of various operating systems.

This session will cover the IBM software and hardware solutions that your organization can use to store archive data, including features like immutability, Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) technology and Non-Erasable, Non-Rewriteable (NENR) enforcement. The discussion will include high-level concepts like chronological and event-based retention, litigation hold and release, as well as an overview of the products and solutions from IBM that you can deploy today.

IBM Watson: How it Works and What it Means for Society Beyond Winning Jeopardy!

In 2011, the IBM Watson computer was able to beat the top-earning human winners on the trivia game-show “Jeopardy!” As I was the author of [How to Build Your Own Watson Junior in Your Basement], I have been asked to explain how the IBM Watson system was put together, how it works, and what examples of text mining and big data analytics means for society as we apply technology to meet tomorrow's challenges.

Using Social Media for IBM System Storage - Birds of a Feather

I will be moderating this Birds of a Feather, or BOF, session that will bring together a Q&A panel of experts on how social media can be leveraged to help you do your job, get the information you need to solve problems, and share your knowledge with others.

Data Footprint Reduction is the catch-all term for a variety of technologies designed to help reduce storage costs. In this session, I will cover thin provisioning, space-efficient copies, deduplication and compression technologies, and describe the IBM storage products that provide these capabilities.

IBM's Storage Strategy in the Smarter Computing Era

Confused about IBM's new initiatives for Big Data analytics, Workload Optimized Systems, and Cloud Computing? This session will explain it all, and how IBM's strategy for its various storage products and solutions fit into these overall themes.

IBM SONAS and the IBM Cloud Storage Taxonomy

Confused over the different types of cloud storage? IBM's scale-out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) can be used in a variety of use cases. This session will provide an overview of IBM's SONAS solution, provide an update on the latest features and functions recently announced, and explain how it can be deployed in various private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Overview and Update

IBM has enhanced its premier storage infrastructure management tool: IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. This session will provide both an overview of the product, and explain the latest features and functions recently announced.